There and Back Again

It's been a rough few days, trying to figure out how not to undo all of the work I did standardizing Unicode as the client's de facto method of handling strings. I literally went through three separate conversions. The first to ensure that the data system could easily handle switching to any new method of storing basic values, seeing as I had changed it once, then back when it turned out Qt's Unicode QStrings couldn't handle extended ASCII characters as gracefully as I needed them to. The second conversion turned out a mess as I couldn't decide on which server assets handled by the client to keep Unicode-ized, and which to revert back to standard strings. I was very unhappy with the end result, and so ended up scrapping it entirely, resolving to try keep as many of the original changes to Unicode as possible, treating only file transfer pathnames as standard strings to ensure the client can again download files with extended ASCII in their names shared by users of the original Soulseek client.

I finally feel good about the whole thing. It's been an ordeal, but I feel like I've managed to emerge from it with much more than I started with, checking off some of my longest standing cleanup and redesign goals. None of this is to say that I'm positive nothing became mangled or unusable as a result of all that change. I am ready and willing to fix anything that might have.

As a last second perk, I also decided to get rid of the near-useless menu bar and actually useless status bar for some serious extra real estate. You might feel a little too close to the edges with all that absent space at the top and bottom, but I think like myself you'll quickly come to appreciate it.

Links on the download page!

Thanks, Nir